Contra MundumNo. 6 Winter 1993

Interview With Gene Bradley:Accused Assassin of J.F.K.

In 1967 Gene Bradley was indicted for conspiring to assassinate President John
F. Kennedy. Jim Garrison, the New Orleans District Attorney lionized in Oliver
Stone's JFK, charged Bradley with complicity in the assassination of the
president. The indictment was international news and the Bradley case was very
controversial. For the first time in its history California (under then-governor
Ronald Reagan) refused to extradite someone under felony indictment for murder.
Successful in his fight against extradition, Bradley continued a lengthy legal
battle through defamation of character law suits to clear his name, in which he
also succeeded. In April, 1991, Bradley met with Mr. Garrison who admitted that
there had been a tragic mistake. Bradley has just finished a book about his
experiences entitled, Accused Assassin of JFK. Contra Mundum interviewed
Mr. Bradley while he was visiting his son and wife and their five children in
Tennessee.

CM: What were the original charges against you?

BRADLEY: That I had conspired to assassinate President Kennedy . A
related charge was that I was involved in complicity to murder the president. A
later accusation was that the C.I.A. had a small group of highly trained
assassins to carry out political assassina tions around the world, that Gene
Bradley now headed up this group, and that I was the chief assassin for the
C.I.A. That was a report made to Garrison by one of his staff members.

CM: Just for the record, are you a C.I.A. assassin?

BRADLEY: I am not, and I was not in the C.I.A. Ironically, I was
preparing to join the C.I.A., and had taken classes in International Law,
Counter Insurgency, and Police Science, and was a police sergeant in the
reserves in California. The man heading up the C.I.A. at the time was Admiral
W.W. Rayburn, one of my former shipmates, whom I knew well as Lieutenant J.G. -
Lieutenant Junior Grade.

CM: Did the people make the charges because they knew you were
acquainted with Rayburn?

BRADLEY: No. I did not tell anyone about that until recently. They
assumed that because of my work in opposing subversive activities that I was a
part of the C.I.A.

CM: Do you think your political activities at the time helped provoke
the charges? I.e., did being the West Coast representative for Carl McIntire
help prompt the accusations?

BRADLEY: I think that had a lot to do with it, because the people who
concocted these charges were very anti-McIntire and I think they felt this was
one way of getting at him. Because I was also exposing subversive activities,
especially among politicians that was one way of putting me out of action and
bringing tremendous harm to Dr. McIntire's radio broadcast.

CM: How did California respond to Garrison's indictment?

BRADLEY: I was informed that never before in history had the state
refused to extradite someone accused of a felony of this order - the murder of a
president, or any other murder.

CM: Who was involved in refusing the extradition request?

BRADLEY: Governor Reagan took quite an interest in the case. Ed Meese
was the extradition secretary, and he was the one who held the hearing to see if
I should be extradited. The California authorities requested from the Louisiana
authorities any witnesses or information they had about why I should be extra
dited, but none was forthcoming. There was no evidence to verify that I was ever
in New Orleans or committed a crime in New Orleans, which was necessary for
granting the extradition request. In fact, I had never been to New Orleans or to
Dallas until four years after the president was killed.

CM: You weren't in Dallas in 1963 when Kennedy was shot?

BRADLEY: No. I had never been to Dallas. I was on a Greyhound bus
traveling to El Paso when the assassination took place. I was on business for
Dr. McIntire.

CM: How long was the indictment in effect?

BRADLEY: I think it was until 1971.

CM: How did the charges originate?

BRADLEY: They originated from four people who wanted to do harm to me
and to Dr. McIntire. One of them planted the seed, and the others built the
story around it. Three of these four people had been convinced that I had had
some of them and their friends arrested, or intended to have them arrested. They
wanted to get me, because they were convinced that I was after them. Two of the
four had felony records. One was convicted on weapons and morals charges. He
thought I had been the cause of his arrests. He was the one who said that I had
offered him $10,000 to kill the president. He said that he had reported this to
two F.B.I agents, but the agents denied that he had ever mentioned my name.

CM: Was it against these people that you had the defamation of
character, or slander suits?

BRADLEY: Yes. The suit was against the four people who concocted the
plot against me. I won the suit, though I never recovered any money - only the
lawyers got any money out of it.

CM: I understand that there was a swarm of media people around your
home when the story broke, and that Tom Brokaw had to sit through a Bible Study
before he got an interview.

BRADLEY: Tom Brokaw wasn't at the Bible Study, but he interviewed me
the next day at home. We had the Bible study on December 20, 1967 and, because
we were welcoming Brent home from college, we had 37 people over that evening.
It wasn't long until we had that many media people, if not more, both inside and
outside.

CM: What did McIntire have to say - you were his representative?

BRADLEY: He held an interview the following day in Collingwood, New
Jersey after he called me and got all the details - and he fully stood by me and
defended me. He said that murder was something no Christian supported.

CM: Tell the story about how you were on duty with the police
auxiliary when LBJ came to Los Angeles.

BRADLEY: It was Hubert Humphrey, and he was running for president in
1968. It was in Burbank, and he came to the Warner Brothers Studio to meet with
many of the Hollywood liberals. When I was called to be on police duty to help
protect Hubert Humphrey, I thought the sergeant who called was joking. I said,
You want me, an accused assassin, to protect Hubert Humphrey? He said, I'm
serious . I told the sergeant not to place me near Humphrey, because if he even
stubbed his toe, I would get the blame. I often wondered what Humphrey would
have thought if he knew the accused assassin of JFK was standing near him -
fully (and legally) armed.

CM: Were there personal threats against you?

BRADLEY: There were all kinds of threats by phone - literally by the
hundreds. One night, as I walked past the light in the living room, a bullet
came through my front window. We never knew who did it. I had my suspicions, but
proving it was another story. There were a couple of bombings, as well. One
bomb, set at our house by some kids trying to harass us, shook two city blocks.
A carbomb - had it not malfunctioned - could have killed my son. As it was, he
said he thought he was going to be launched to the moon.

CM: You mentioned that you had trouble gathering information, because
of people who were totally set against you.

BRADLEY: One of my main witnesses in the extradition hearing - a woman
who had seen me in Tulsa, Oklahoma just before the assassination - backed down
on her promise to testify on my behalf. Her lawyer, who was very liberal, talked
her out of testifying. We were able to get an affidavit from her. Throughout the
process, the extreme far left continually treated hearsay rumors as fact and
encouraged Governor Reagan to extradite me.

CM: About the assassination - the Warren Commission concluded that a
lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, was solely responsible. Are you persuaded by
that?

BRADLEY: I am persuaded that no one who knew anything about
investigations - or did their homework - would conclude that Lee Harvey Oswald
was the lone assassin. There is much evidence of a coverup. And it takes someone
in a very high position who has enough control in Washington and the news media
who can cover up such a crime as this.

CM: What are your thoughts on the Warren Commission?

BRADLEY: There wasn't a one of them on the whole commission who was a
constitutionalist and believed in the U.S. Constitution - with maybe one
exception.

CM: Who was that?

BRADLEY: Russell Long, of Louisiana.

CM: What was the Warren Commission's motivation?

BRADLEY: It is a far-out opinion, and I think I'll pass on that. But I
have my opinions on it. I think the cover-up came from high up. When people can
elect a president no one ever heard of; when people can kill a president and no
one ever finds who did it - really who did it; when there is a major coverup on
the Kennedy assassination; when a president can be dismissed from office; you
know there has to be some very powerful influences from very high up. I am
convinced that the same people who have this kind of power were involved in the
murders of John Kennedy and probably Martin Luther King.

CM: What do you think of Oliver Stone's film JFK?

BRADLEY: I credit it with awakening America to the fact that there was
a conspiracy. And he does have many facts in his movie that can be verified, but
he has other information that is typically Hollywood that I do not think was
necessary.

CM: Were you in the film? I remember something about an extradition
affair in California in the movie.

BRADLEY: By name I was not in the film, but there appeared to be a
reference to me.

CM: The film portrayed Garrison as a crusader for truth. What are your
feelings about that? And tell us about your recent visit with Garrison in New
Orleans.

BRADLEY: I called Mr.Garrison in 1991 and told him how much I would
like to meet with him, and he said he would like see me as much as I would like
to see him. He invited me to Louisiana, and we did meet with him in April, 1991.
He was a typical southern gentleman, and we discussed the President Kennedy
assassination. He was convinced that the C.I.A. was in back of the
assassination. I have found no such information at all, and can find nothing to
verify or prove that they were involved. But there is considerable evidence that
there was a cover-up by another branch of the government, and it was not the
F.B.I. or the C.I.A.

CM: When did Garrison figure out you were innocent of the indictment
that he had initiated?

BRADLEY: I phoned Mr. Garrison and talked to him about the charges
against me shortly after the Clay Shaw trial. (Shaw was found innocent - I think
it was in 1969 - after the jury deliberated for less than an hour.) During our
1991 meeting, Garrison asked if I remem bered that phone call. He said that
after the third sentence came out of my mouth, he knew I was not guilty as I had
been charged, and wondered why I had been set up. Garrison told me that once he
realized that I was not involved and that both he and I had been set up, he
never mentioned my name again.

CM: There was a man with mob connections who had a name similar to
yours?

BRADLEY: Yes. There was a Eugene Hale Brading who had twenty or
twenty- five arrests. He was connected with the crime syndicate - or so I have
been told. At one time he used the alias of Eugene Bradley. And he was in Dallas
when Kennedy was shot. Then there was also a man who was a pilot arrested by
Castro and put in prison, whose name was Leslie Bradley. He did hang around the
Lakefront Airport, and some people thought that they were referring to me when
they were talking about Leslie Bradley.

CM: The Stone film, JFK suggests that the plot against Kennedy
was driven by militant, right-wing homosexuals. Did you know a lot of right-wing
homosexuals?

BRADLEY: (laughter) No. I don't know one right-wing homosexual. No, I
objected to the portrayal that the right-wing was involved in any way. As a
matter of fact, I am convinced that it was exactly the opposite.

CM: Stone has a gigantic conspiracy involving the C.I.A., the F.B.I.,
the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, etc. What do you think of a conspiracy that
involves virtually every branch of the government and hundreds, maybe thousands
of people?

BRADLEY: If there had been that many involved in a major conspiracy,
some one would be talking by now. Conspiracies usually involve only a few
people. Larger groups have helped cover it up, because they want to conceal
their ultra-liberal positions in bringing about a world government.

CM: You mentioned that Stone brings out some good points about the
assassination. What are some of those?

BRADLEY: I am thoroughly convinced that Kennedy was shot from in front
and in no way could he have been shot from the sixth floor of the Dallas Book
Depository, the way the Warren Commission has portrayed it. The Zapruder film is
one of the key pieces of information, here. The autopsy is also critical. The
man who took the photo graphs during the autopsy now claims that the pictures in
the archives are not the ones that he took. For the record, a man has stated
that he wrapped President Kennedy's body in a hospital bedsheet and placed it in
a very expen sive bronze casket in Dallas. When it arrived in Bethesda it was in
a different kind of casket and the president's body was in a bodybag. Jackie
Kennedy arrived later with the bronze casket. The people in the hospital had
been examin ing Kennedy's body for several minutes before Jackie arrived - this
has been pretty well proven. Another thing: the mystery bullet was found on a
gurney, and the man who found it said it was not on the gurney that was used for
John Connelly, which was where the bullet should have been. The bullet was
completely intact and almost pristine; a bullet that goes through a body -
hitting bones and so forth - is usually damaged. The picture of Oswald on the
front of Life magazine showing him with a gun in his hand and a pistol on his
hip - the only portion of that photograph that was actually of him was from the
crease of the chin and up. From the chin down was not of Oswald. And that has
been analyzed by the top experts.

CM: It seems that this is why the Stone film was so persuasive; it had
legitimate pieces of information mixed in with Stone's wilder theories.

BRADLEY: Yes. He made some good points. But then he went off and made
Guy Bannister, a retired F.B.I. agent, look like an idiot and a depraved
homosexual. And the language in the movie was unnecessary. I don't think people
talk that way - even in non-Christian circles. It was overdone.

CM: The Stone film makes much of the witnesses who disappeared or died
mysteriously. Did you see any evidence of this?

BRADLEY: There could be some significance in that. Lloyds of London
said that this was most unusual, and there is no instance of anything like this
ever happening. I know of two instances. There was a deputy sheriff who said
that he had seen me posing as a secret service agent outside the Book Depository
about the time of the assassination. Later, he phoned me twice, collect. A paper
in Midlothian, Texas, later wrote that I was harassing him, almost daily. In his
last call to me, he indicated that he needed money and would say just about
anything I wanted for money. I told him that I wouldn't give him a plug nickel
because he owed it to our country and to me to tell the truth, and that he knew
he hadn't seen me. He later committed suicide. Another witness for Garrison, who
said he had seen me in New Orleans having lunch with some body months before the
assassination, later disappeared. He flew his airplane out over the Gulf, and it
never returned.

CM: It is hard to claim you are harassing someone over the phone when
they are calling collect.

BRADLEY: (laughter) That's right. And I still have the phone records
to prove it.

CM: There are a number of books about the assassination; can you
mention some that you think are good, and some that you think are poor?

BRADLEY: Well, The Kennedy Conspiracy, by Paris Flammonde, is
full of false information pertaining to me. It has some of Mark Lane's concocted
lies. Mark Lane is an extreme liberal lawyer. As a matter of fact, he has
belonged to known communist fronts. There are people who think that he
deliberately misleads the public regarding the assassination. It appears he
doesn't want the actual truth to come out - he seems to always blame the wrong
people. The Best Evidence, by David Lifton, is one of the better
researched books about the assassination. Jim Garrison's On the Trail of the
Assassins is well written, but I have not found any evidence - at all - that
points to the C.I.A.

CM: You have a chapter in your book on ":Positive Identification"
about your experience in a bookstore when the Flammonde book came out.

BRADLEY: When I went into the Beverly Hills bookstore, I heard the
young clerks talking about this Gene Bradley . They didn't recognize me, so I
asked them about him (i.e., me). They insisted that they could spot this
character in a minute. I showed them the picture of me in the Flammonde book,
and they assured me he was the culprit. They didn't recognize me until I wrote a
check and pulled out my driver's license with E. Eugene Bradley on it. The clerk
recoiled as if I was going to shoot him.

CM: What is the emphasis of the book you just finished writing?

BRADLEY: Basically, how an innocent man can be charged with such a
horren dous crime, and all the details leading up to it.

CM: Does it deal much with the Kennedy assassination, or mostly your
own personal experiences?

BRADLEY: Mostly with my personal experience.

CM: You mentioned that you have a considerable Christian testimony in
the book. Can you describe that?

BRADLEY: I would say that I leaned heavily on Romans 8:28, and had I
not been a Christian I might have committed a crime against the people who did
this to me. One of the most important things that occurred concerned a man
stricken with cancer. He had been told that he had two weeks left to live and
was sent home to die. After seeing one of my television interviews, he phoned me
at home. He wanted to know how I could be so calm and maintain my sense of humor
in the face of such a devastat ing charge. I stated at the time over T.V. that I
know I am not guilty; God knows that I am not guilty and that is what is
important . Jack said, I want what you have, Gene . I went to see him and a few
days later he accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as his personal Savior. He lived
for over two years and spent all that time witnessing to the others about the
Lord. If one soul could have been saved by what I went through, it was worth it
and I would go through it all over again. That's my last chapter in my book -
telling about that and other instances.

CM: What is the status of your book now?

BRADLEY: It's in the hands of agents - deciding if they want to
promote the book.

CM: You are a native Arkansawyer. Are you excited about the prospects
of a Clinton Presidency?

BRADLEY: I'm afraid I wouldn't vote for Mr.Clinton if he were the only
man running. I don't want a man who will demonstrate with the communists while
our men are fighting and giving their lives in Viet Nam. I don't care for a man
whose character is so besmirched with having affairs with other women, including
a black woman who is now suing him for being the father of her child. I'm not
pleased with Bush's promoting a one world government, but I will take him over
Clinton.

CM: Bill Clinton was a Rhodes scholar. Are you proud of the fact that
a man from such an impoverished state was a Rhodes scholar?

BRADLEY: I would never vote for a man who was a Rhodes scholar. It is
a major way of training people for a one world government. His favorite
professor at Georgetown was Carol Quiggley, who was a one-worlder of the worst
sort.

CM: Since you have been involved in politics for decades, perhaps you
have some insight into the future. What are your hopes and fears for the future
of the United States?

BRADLEY: It seems that even some of the liberals are becoming scared
of a one world government - to send our facto ries to other countries and
promote other countries over the United States. I feel our presidents should put
America first and put American interests first, rather than the interests of
those who want to control the finances of the world through a world government.
That is most frightening. One worldism is worse than communism.

CM: I take it that you are not a gleeful supporter of the United
Nations?

BRADLEY: Absolutely not. It should be removed from the United States
and the United States should withdraw from it. The United Nations is basically
anti-constitutional.

CM: What hopes do you have for the future of the United States, if
any?

BRADLEY: I have hopes with reservations of seeing some of the
youngsters coming up, who are concerned about our country, and hope that we can
get some of them elected to the government before they bring in the one world
constitution.

CM: Any last thoughts?

BRADLEY: If my people will humble themselves and pray and seek my face
the good Lord will heal our land. And that is something to lean on at this time.